I cannot simply enter “Rochester Park”. I must enter a block number. So, I plucked a number from the air: “9″.

After x seconds of inactivity, map.gov.sg would show a timeout message and then a timeout screen (!) as follows:

As TedFox noted, “[map.gov.sg does] not provide any bus/mrt directions (which can be taken from the sbs website though)”. It also does not provide other useful information such as “Satellite Image”, “What’s nearby”, “Analyse Loc”, “Related Editorials” at the top of the StreetDirectory.com page:

Nor does it provide this useful titbit of information at the bottom of the page:

“Streetdirectory.com Rochester Park is located in Dover, Singapore. The Dover district is a small one filled with schools and tertiary institutions. Private schools such as Anglo Chinese School (Independent), or ACSI, and Anglo Chinese Junior College are located here, as well as public schools such as Fairfield Methodist Secondary School. Many locals study in ITE Dover to obtain technical certificates or go for a diploma education at Singapore Polytechnic. Many expatriates sent their children to United World College Southeast Asia (UWCSEA), one of Singapore’s international schools. These expatriates also enjoy going for a drink at Rochester Park, a popular cluster of restaurants and wine bars in Dover.”

Recycler: Dragging out some old goodies from the archives and reposting them for your new readers. (Collis didn’t have any example here, so I’ve added one. This “recycler” is a good online friend of mine. Her blog, a model for me at one point, also contains other types of posts.)

Guest-Poster: Your guest gets an extra plug, you get a day off and your readers get some variety.

Announcer: Own local blog news, short and sweet. E.g. what you plan to do, a new competition, reset of top commenters.

ONE GREAT IDEA that I took away from Nexus 2007 is what Nathan Torkington (O’Reilly) calls Continous Partial Attention. Not that the phenomenon is new, but because it describes succinctly what I’ve been (and still am) experiencing. Finally, I can name it.

This is a new design challenge in this age of information anxiety and abundance of meaning. More and more people, myself included, are doing many things at the same time. However, decades of research (and common sense) have indicated that the quality of one’s output and depth of thought deteriorate as one attends to ever more tasks. For example:

“We are under the impression that we have this brain that can do more than it often can,” says René Marois, neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University, quoted in a recent NYTimes piece about how multi-taskers max out their brains, creating neural network bottlenecks and causing confusion and mistakes (thanks, Susan Mernit).

When people try to perform two or more related tasks either at the same time or alternating rapidly between them, errors go way up, and it takes far longer–often double the time or more–to get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially, says David E. Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan: “The toll in terms of slowdown is extremely large–amazingly so.” (thanks, DeedsDoing 2006)

“Kids that are instant messaging while doing homework, playing games online and watching TV, I predict, aren’t going to do well in the long run,” says Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, quoted in a CNN report last year.